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Grilled Fish

A grilled bream topped with a sauce of anchovy, butter, milk, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Grilled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Preheat the grill or oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Butter a tin dish and place the bream inside.

  3. Sprinkle the fish with pepper, coarse sea salt, and bread crumbs.

  4. Melt half the butter and pour it over the fish.

Grill and make the sauce

  1. Grill the fish until cooked through.

  2. Pound the anchovy and combine it in a saucepan with the remaining butter, lemon juice, and milk.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish and pour the sauce over it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bream
Is the main protein that is cooked through and served as the dish.
Anchovy
Pounded into the sauce to add a salty, savoury depth of flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the bread crumbs brown on the fish.
Bread crumbs
Form a light crust on the fish that helps hold in moisture and adds browning.
Milk
Gives the sauce a smooth, creamy body and mellows the sharpness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Milk can scorch or separate if it boils too hard or too long on the base of a saucepan. Keep the heat controlled so the sauce stays smooth and does not catch.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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